EARLY A YEAR PASSED.  Over the course of that year’s Saturday visits to the Glynns, a year of drawing lessons and contest entries, I got to know Andy and Rosetta.  I learned quite a lot about their remarkable lives, from them, in their own words, and what I learned directly from them taught me how much of what I had thought I knew about them—that is, what I’d learned from my parents and their friends—was wrong. 
    To be completely accurate, I learned about the Glynns in Rosetta’s words. Since I was as curious a fellow then as I am now, I was always asking her questions.  I would ask her about anything that intrigued me, and she would answer me, in her fashion.  By that I mean that she would always tell me something in response to my questions, and what she told me was always in some way related to what I wanted to know, but I didn’t always realize at the time what that relationship was.  I would ask her the simplest sort of question, and she would use it as a springboard for a leap into the past.  It might be something about one of the contests.  I might ask: “Do you think I should say anything about the fact that prunes have pits?” or “If you can pack as much as they claim into these suitcases, won’t they be pretty heavy?”
    “Ah, prunes!” she would say, and drop her pencil on the table as if something about prunes made her wistful and dreamy, or she would throw her hands in the air and shout, “Suitcases!  Luggage!  Baggage!”  She would sit back and look upward, and she would begin to talk, and after a few words I would understand that she had heard my question as “Tell me about the first time you fell in love” or “Please describe the methods of farming employed in your village when you were a girl.”
    Often, she would call for a glass of slivovitz, and I soon learned where it was kept.  I would get her tiny tumbler, set it in front of her, fill it, and set the bottle beside the glass, without comment.  While Rosetta talked, she sipped.  She refilled her glass absentmindedly, and she would go on and on about the dark eyes and reedy voice of her first love or the many aspects of spreading manure that required the grudging labor of a young girl, and then, at a point that I rarely saw coming, the slivovitz would take its toll, her words would begin to run together, and she would sigh and return to the prunes or the luggage or whatever had prompted my question, and tell me that “every happy moment has its pit” or that “when you get to be my age all your suitcases are heavy,” and the story would be at an end.
    (As a boy, I tried, for a while, perhaps a year or so before the time when I was hanging around with the Glynns, to get interested in photography, but my interest had to contend with and was eventually overcome by a repulsion induced by a lingering association of photography with sickness, and, specifically, with vomit.  That association was brought on by the fact that a neighbor—or my mother, or some school chum—had brought me, as a diversion while I was sick with the flu, a stack of library books that included a mildewed copy of a book on photography.  When I opened the book it exhaled an odor like the stink that drifts from dark alleys where garbage has been left to ripen.  Manfully, I made the effort to read it, or at least leaf through it, since it was a gift and represented affection and concern.  I forced myself to overcome my revulsion.  I read the book and, to show how grateful I was for the thought behind the gift, labored for a while to become a photographic adept.  In the effort, I acquired some basic equipment, turned a portion of my parents’ cellar into a darkroom, and made enough unsatisfactory prints to learn that I would never be much of a photographer.  However, along the way, I wrung from the hobby its best metaphoric experiences: the processes of development and printing.  After I had developed some understanding of the negative of an image as the inverse of experience and of the positive print of an image gradually appearing on a blank sheet of photographic paper as the revelation of the detailed if often poorly focused truth in what may at first seem a blank and nearly meaningless experience, emerging slowly, as if reluctantly, as if it were being teased, forced, or seduced into revealing itself by the skill, will, or art of the photographer, I felt that I had sufficiently acknowledged the generosity of the gift and sufficiently justified my investment to be free to abandon the effort, and so I did, to the delight of my mother, who found it smelly.)  Like a photographic print in a developing bath in a darkroom, my understanding of some of the things Rosetta told me developed slowly as the seasons came around again to early fall.  Two impressions stood out from all the others: that Rosetta seemed to have been waiting for me, her proper audience, and that life for a great many people whom I had never met had been far darker, more disappointing, and frightening than it had been for the people who were forever telling me about the night the Nevsky mansion burned.
    I should admit, I suppose, in the interest of frankness, that I never did very well at those contests.  I couldn’t seem to come up with much of anything that provided the shock of the new, and my expressions of hope never really went beyond the hope that I would win.  To my mind, the closest I came was my entry for Troubled Titan Peas: “Troubled Titan Brand Baby Peas are my first choice for stocking a family fallout shelter because they’re ready in a jiffy, they taste much better than lima beans, and they can be fun to play with if you don’t have any other way to pass the time, which could be a problem in a fallout shelter.”
    This entry became something of a joke in the Glynn household.  Margot and Martha collapsed in giggles as soon as they heard it, and Andy said, almost at once, “That’s just what I’ve been looking for!  I’ve never had a good name for it before!  I’ve needed a kind of general-purpose phrase for those time-consuming little chores that must be repeated and repeated throughout a person’s life without ever being finished!  Like cleaning rollers!  Buying cigarettes!  Cleaning leaves from the gutters!  Changing the damned oil in the damned car!  We’re always doing that—stuff—and then one day we discover that we’ve wasted quite a lot of the little time we have in this puppet play on these useless and forgettable pastimes.  Thank you, Peter!  Thank you!”
    From then on, whenever he had to go to the village to get cigarettes or had to clean the leaves from the gutters or had to change the oil in the car, he would say, “I’m going to play with my peas.”
    For Rosetta, my entry in the Troubled Titan Peas contest represented something else.  “This is quite a document!” she said.  “I think it says much more than you know.  I think it is a kind of testimony.  It bears witness to your honesty, your total unwillingness to compromise what you actually think by giving the contest organizers what they want.”  She paused and smiled and said, “I’m proud of you.”  After a moment, she added, “Of course, you haven’t got a chance.”
    If I never succeeded in giving the contest organizers what they wanted, I did succeed in giving Andy and Rosetta what they wanted.  Over the course of the year, as I got to know them, they got to know me, and finally, after a year of visits, a year of lessons from Andy, a year of collaboration with Rosetta, they came to trust me enough to allow me to walk their daughters to the movies.

A splendidly vivid exploration of “sexual pleasure amplified and augmented by the thrill of adventure”

At Home with the Glynns is published in paperback by Picador, a division of St. Martin’s Press, at $11.00.

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At Home with the Glynns is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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First published by Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group. 

The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile.